Filipino · Soup
Sinigang na Baboy
- Intermediate
- 1 h 40 m
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a warm current of chile, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 800g pork belly or ribs, chunked
- 1 packet sinigang mix, or the honest road: 300g fresh tamarind simmered and strained
- 2 tomatoes, 1 onion, 1 daikon radish, sliced
- Long green beans, taro chunks (they thicken), water spinach (kangkong)
- 1–2 long green chilies; fish sauce to season
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieveSkimming: foam, fat and a clear broth
The words inside
Why Restaurants Fail: The Honest ListRadishTaroWatermelon Radish
Allergen screen
Found: fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer pork with onion and tomato until tender, 45–60 min, skimming. 60 min
- Add taro; cook 15 min until it starts dissolving at the edges: that is your body. 15 min
- Sour it: tamarind until your eyes want to close; season with fish sauce.
- Radish and beans; then kangkong and chilies for the final 2 min, barely wilted. 2 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes
- It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
- The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
- Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
- The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
- Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.
Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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